Brezhnev, Polish Minister Denounce 'Western Subversion' in Crisis

By Kevin KloseDecember 27, 1980

Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and a top Polish official at a Kremlin meeting today jointly attacked what they termed Western attempts to subvert communist rule in Poland and disrupt Warsaw Pact relations.

The denunciation, described in a brief dispatch by Tass, the official press agency, declared that "imperialist and other reactionary circles" seek to "interfere in Poland's internal affairs." This charge by Brezhnev and Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Czyrek was aimed at NATO which has warned of strong sanctions if there is direct Soviet intervention in the Polish crisis.

The two men met "in a warm, cordial atmosphere," Tass said of the first top-level Polish-Soviet meeting since the NATO foreign ministers' session earlier this month. The Tass statement closely followed the official line from Warsaw and Moscow and emphasized anew that, unlike the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968, leaders of both countries are in substantial ideologicial agreement.

Brezhnev seemed to reaffirm Kremlin support for the Warsaw government of Stanislaw Kania, declaring, according to Tass, his "confidence" that restoring Poland to political and economic stability "would be accomplished under the guidance of" the Polish Communist Party.

Brezhnev and Czyrek "resolutely denounced attempts of imperialists and other reactionary circles to conduct subversive activities against Poland, to interfere in its internal affairs and its allied relations based on the principles of socialist internationalism," Tass asserted.

The reference to "socialist internationalism" is taken by analysts here to mean the Kremlin's explanation of its 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia as a duty of the socialist camp to preserve jointly the gains of their movement.

Meanwhile the Communist Party paper Pravda, in a major new attempt to deal with Poland's independent trade unions, asserted today that in Communist countries unions "don't need the right to strike," and when they did strike they only played into the hands of anti-socialist subversives.

The lengthy Pravda article sought to show that history made clear the evolution of the state and Communist Party as supreme arbiters over all other factions within a socialist country and that trade unions must conform with this.

Soviet officials watching the rise of Solidarity and other independent Polish unions have quoted Lenin to prove the supremacy of the party in all aspects of union activities. Today Prof. M. Baglai, a legal specialist, wrote in Pravda that Trotsky and other powerful enemies of Soviet communism wanted to oppose unions to the state, or make them part of state power.

Instead, Baglai explained, the system in place today allows unions to defend workers' rights yet accede to the party's control, since the party is the main pathfinder of the Marxist-Leninist way. In addition, he warned, "factory work stoppages -- and this is shown convincingly by recent Polish developments -- play into the hands of antisocialist elements who strive to turn society away from the socialist path of development."

To Western eyes, these doctrinal disputes have a dizzying, or numbing, impact in trying to determine the direction in which the leadership may be heading. But over the five months of the Polish turmoil, the Kremlin consistently has pursued twin objectives:

It has brought its military strength and readiness in its border regions to full strength at the highest level. And it steadily and doggedly has laid out a range of ideological justifications for eventful Soviet intervention.

All of this has proceeded even as Kania's leadership has appeared to wield increasingly greater control, and the Catholic Church and the unions themselves have begun calling for restraint.